Minority Nationalisms in South Asia

Tanweer Fazal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317966463
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Nationalisme et patriotisme

South Asia is the theatre of myriad experimentations with nationalisms of various kinds - religious, linguistic, religio-linguistic, composite, plural and exclusivist. In all the region's major states, officially promulgated nationalism at various times has been fiercely contested by minority groups intent on preserving what they see as the pristine purity of their own cultural inheritance.

This volume examines the perspective of minority identities as they negotiate their terms of co-existence, accommodation and adaptation with several other competing identities within the framework of the 'nation state' in South Asia. It examines three different kinds of minority articulations – cultural conclaves with real or fictitious attachments to an imaginary homeland, the identity problems of dispersed minorities with no territorial claims and the aspirations of indigenous communities, tribes or ethnicities.

The essays in this volume offer a rich menu: the evolution of Naga nationalism, the construction of the territory-less Sylheti identity, the debates over Pashtun nationalism in Pakistan, the evolution of Muslim nationalism in Sri Lanka, the politics of religious minorities in Bangladesh and Pakistan, the making of minority politics in India, and questions of Islam and nationalism in colonial India. It is an eclectic mix for students of nationalism, politics, modern history and anyone interested in the evolution of South Asia.

This book was published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

Introduction

Minorities and their nationalism(s): the terms of a discourse in South Asia

Tanweer Fazal

Nelson Mandela Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India

South Asia is the theatre of myriad experimentations with the doctrine of nationalism: religious, linguistic, religio-linguistic, composite, plural or exclusive – the region stands witness to all. However, officially promulgated nationalism, presented as the finality of one's affiliations and loyalties, comes to be fiercely contested by minority groups resolute on preserving what they see as the pristine purity of their cultural inheritance. A minority's claim to selfhood is consistently called into question through a politics of nomenclature. The nationalism of the minority groups is frequently relegated to either sub-nationalism, proto-nationalism or a pre-modern appellation, ethnicity. This article examines the perspective of minority identities as they negotiate their terms of co-existence, accommodation and adaptation with several other competing identities within the framework of ‘nation state’.

The polyethnic constitution of most South Asian states notwithstanding, the desire to fashion a state anchored in a homogenous people or a nation has proved irresistible to state functionaries and sections of national elites. Officially promulgated nationalism – state-led for Charles Tilly¹ – is the vehicle to realize this convergence of culture and polity: the ‘nation state’. In the given discourse, nationalism, defined as the finality of one's affiliations and loyalties, comes to be fiercely contested by minority groups resolute on preserving what they see as the pristine purity of their cultural inheritance. Of the seven states (eight if Afghanistan is to be included) that comprise South Asia, at least six have adopted the faith of the majority as state religion.² Besides, official language policies, carefully crafted by the elite, have been deployed in almost all states of the region to define national culture. Nonetheless, the states of South Asia, caught between the contradictory pulls of tradition and modernity have, by and large, desisted from becoming theocracies. It should also be conceded that in most such states, minority groups do enjoy recognition and constitutional protection to varying degrees. This volume examines the perspective of minority identities as they negotiate their terms of coexistence, accommodation and adaptation with several other competing identities within the framework of the ‘nation state’.

In terms of its capacity to express and assert itself, minority nationalism is surely asymmetrical to project nationhood, the dominant nationalist discourse or the assimilatory programme unleashed through national ministries of education and culture. While the massive apparatus at the disposal of the state is harnessed to conjure up a national identity consistent with the loyalty that the former demands, minority nationalist articulations, in the ethnically differentiated states of South Asia, draw their inspiration and support from the cultural community within which they are located. It is worth taking into account the very artificiality of this hegemonic nationalism and its persisting divergence from minority nationalisms. A minority's claim to selfhood is consistently called into question through a politics of nomenclature. In a discourse with obvious political implications, social science scholarship – its claims of objectivity notwithstanding – has been distinctly partisan. The nationalism of the minority groups is frequently relegated to either sub-nationalism, proto-nationalism or a pre-modern appellation, ethnicity. Sub-nationalism or ethnicity, in the given formulation, is discussed merely as a residual category – a by-product of an inept exercise in nation-building.³

This is why the intellectual exercises involved in the forging of the nationalism of peripheral nations seek first to demolish the attempts at state/nation congruence. In Pakistan, while the official discourse tried to build ‘Pakistani nationhood’ on the edifice of Islam and the language, Urdu, G.M. Syed, the ‘grand old man of Sindhi nationalism’ refuted it in no uncertain terms⁴:

Sindh has always been there, Pakistan is a passing show. Sindh is a fact, Pakistan is a fiction. Sindhis are a nation, but Muslims are not a nation. Sindhi language is 2000 years old, Urdu is only 250 years old. Sindhi has 52 letters, Urdu has only 26. The enslavement of Sindh by the Punjab in the name of ‘Pakistan’ and ‘Islam’ is a fraud…The Sindhis have long been fooled in the name of Islam.

In South Asia, as elsewhere, the act of construing and constructing nations out of nowhere has not been the exclusive preserve of state enterprise or the entrenched groups aligned to the dominant majority alone. At the same time, nations propped up by minority groups too, despite claims of antiquity and authenticity, have had extremely brief histories of origin. Muslim nationalism, created in the phantasmagoria of territorializing South Asian Islam, collapsed like a house of cards when confronted with a resurgent Bangla nationalism. Mohajirs, the community that prided themselves on being the ideological bearers of Muslim nationalism were quick to disown it, in a changed context, by propelling themselves as the fifth nation of Pakistan along with the Punjabis, the Sindhis, the Balochs and the Pakhtuns. In Sri Lanka, for the Muslims or the Moors, caught in the crossfire between Tamils and the majority Sinhalese, the assertion to cultural distinctiveness is a survival strategy. This religion-centred identity not only sets them apart from the belligerent Tamils but also allowed the Moor elite to flirt with the Sinhala-dominated Sri Lankan state.⁵ A similar artificiality can also be observed, for instance, in the case of Naga nationalism wherein the claim to nationhood rests on the endeavour of the Naga intelligentsia to merge disparate and even hostile tribes living in the designated area of ‘Naga Hills’ into a generic Naga identity.

For theorists of nationalism, therefore, South Asia provides a bewildering context. The French theorist Ernest Renan saw the ‘nation as an everyday plebiscite’ – today, this truism is appropriate to describe the state of affairs in the region. Overnight, it seems communities transform into nations and nations metamorphose into communities. In the case of minority groups particularly, the categories, ‘community’ and ‘nation’ more often than not have superfluous demarcations wherein a community's graduation into the self-exalted status of nationhood is not so infrequent. In such an identity discourse, the claim of being a nation entails shedding the identity of a minority community along with the constitutional protection and safeguards that the category minority brings in. Jinnah, the architect of Muslim nationalism, was explicit in this regard; ‘It does not require political wisdom to realise that all safeguards and settlement would be a scrap of paper, unless they are backed up by power.’⁶ It was this quest for political power that marked the genesis of Muslim nationalism in British India. In the postcolonial situation, the Sikhs attempted a similar shift from community to nation⁷:

…the people who alone in India had developed all the distinct attributes of a nationhood, and had lived as a nation were…styled as a ‘community’…The Sikhs have, however, now emerged from the illusion of being a community, fostered by the lust for domination by Hindu majority and formed the true conception of their status.

In times of peace and quietude, on the other hand, the reversion to a community or minority label too has been remarkably smooth. Muslim leaders in post-Partition India characterized India as Dar al-aman (abode of peace), an innovation over the theological distinction between Dar al-Islam (abode of Islam) and Dar-al Harb (abode of war) while embracing the minority status and its attendant safeguards. Muslim nationalism was now a detested past. In a parallel account, national ambitions of the Sikhs, barring a small section, too seem to have waned having been replaced by the consciousness of being a minority group insistent on constitutional entitlements. This is to such an extent that the Sikhs, who in the state of Indian Punjab constitute a majority, are vying to acquire the status of a religious minority.

Sociologically speaking, the term minority refers to three different strains of cultural communities each specific in terms of their composition and the politics that follows. First, cultural enclaves with real or fictitious association with a homeland. Oommen terms them as nations akin to those of the European type.⁸ Second, communities that are culturally distinct but have no exclusive claim over territories they populate – the dispersed minorities. Usually, they share most cultural artefacts with the coinhabitants of the region and differ from them on one or two counts, such as religion, that they follow. Third, the indigenous communities or tribes. They have all prerequisites of a nation – territory, language, religion – yet are dubbed in the South Asian literature as ‘ethnic groups’ referring thereby to their primordiality.

Nationalist expressions of minority nations look for congruity between power and culture by seeking either autonomy or secession. Cultural genocide coupled with state practices bordering on internal colonialism has impelled many minority nations in South Asia to seek the Westphalian solution, that is, national self-determination. The Kashmiris in Indian Kashmir, the Nagas, the Mizos and many other groups in India's north-east, the Tamils in Sri Lanka or the Balochs in Pakistan took to armed rebellion against the might of the state to realize the objective. The claim to sovereignty of the people in all such cases rested on a supposed convergence of antiquity, homogeneity and territorial contiguity. Phizo, the author of Naga nationalism, thus made the case for plebiscite to achieve a separate Nagalim⁹:

Whether we call a national state or a country, both concerns the same thing: it concerns the territory of a people. Nagaland is the land of the Nagas; it is Naga country and nobody else. We are not refugees or immigrants in this beautiful land. Our own language tells exactly what a country is. We call country ‘Ura’ which literally means ‘we are first’ (u, we; ra, ria, first). The root meaning of territory also developed from the same word; namely, ‘theria’ meaning ‘self first’. And our Naga language is certainly as old as human tradition and history cannot contradict us. No man can argue with fact and existence of Nagaland (Nagara) is a natural fact.

However, except for the case of Bengalis of East Pakistan, such insurgencies to realize separate ethnic homelands have only ended up in the further enslavement of the ‘minority nation’. Claiming a monopoly over violence, the states of South Asia have unleashed counterterror to prevent the dismemberment of the ‘national territory’. On this, the states of South Asia display a remarkable identity of approach. The promulgation of Armed Forces Special Power Act in the ‘disturbed areas’ of India; the brutality unleashed by the state on tribal uprisings in Frontier Pakistan; or more recently, the Sri Lankan Army's annihilation of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Tamils of the north-east region; the inviolability of the states' territorial sovereignty has been ruthlessly established. In hindsight, insurgency in all such instances has only proved counterproductive. In the final analysis, the violence by the rebel groups has been dubbed as ‘terror seeking’ while that of the state as ‘law enforcing’ and legitimate.

Apart from the strategic naivety, calls to self-determination also suffer from epistemological doublespeak insofar as political morality is to be taken into account. In all such upsurges for separation and autonomy, the fundamental issue at stake is the construction of the ‘self’ itself. The normative argument that every ‘people’ have the right to exercise territorial sovereignty as and when they demand leaves minority cultures residing in such territories extremely vulnerable. The question to be asked is, whose ‘self’ and what about other ‘selves’ residing in the vicinity?¹⁰ Since a perfect isomorphism between culture and geography is rare, contesting claims over territories regarded as ancestral and sacred obscure the issue further. For example, following a long spell of violence, the Indian state agreed to an ethnic homeland model to found a Mizo majority province, Mizoram, but in the process left the concerns of the Reangs, an ethnic minority in the region, unattended. The Reangs have therefore organized themselves under a militant outfit to demand a separate district council.

Bangladesh represents a similar case. The ‘Bangalee’ nationalism espoused by the 1972 Constitution of Bangladesh required Bengaliness to be the primary identity of the citizenry. In effect, it presupposed either the extermination of the cultural identity of the non-Bengalis or their submergence in the larger collectivity. This implicit coterminality between citizenship and nationhood is resisted by minority nationalists. For instance, Chakma leader Manabendra Narayan Larma refused to be identified with the Bengali nation. Arguing in 1972, soon after the promulgation of the Constitution (1972), he resisted insistence on Begaliness for Bangladeshi citizenship: ‘I am a Chakma, not a Bengalee. I am a citizen of Bangladesh, a Bangladeshi. You are also a Bangladeshi, but your national identity is Bengalee…They (Chakmas) can never be Bengalee.’¹¹ The Eighth Amendment (1988) to the Bangladeshi Constitution sought to shift from ethnic to territorial nationalism by replacing ‘Bangalee’ with ‘Bangladeshi’ as the primary identity of the citizens. The Fifteenth Amendment, however, has sought to revert back to the ethnic model by insisting on ‘Bangalee’ as national while reserving the term ‘Bangladeshis’ for citizens in general including non-Bengalis.¹²

For most minority nations of South Asia the ‘principle of nationality’ – that nations are destined to realize themselves into a sovereign state – is not a viable option. For one, the failure of most movements for self-determination does not project an encouraging scenario. The cost/benefit ratio seems to be unfavourable. Centralizing states of...